Owner

Current status

Percentage of completion: 100% (confirmed with maintainer, optional part not done for F19)

Detailed Description

The linux kernel collects entropy from various non-deterministic hardware events, like mouse and keyboard input, and network traffic. This entropy is then exposed through /dev/random, commonly used by cryptographic applications that need true randomness to maintain security. However if more entropy is being consumed than is being produced, we have entropy starvation: reading from /dev/random will block, which can cause a denial of service. A common example here is use of /dev/random by SSL in various services.

VirtIO RNG (random number generator) is a paravirtualized device that is exposed as a hardware RNG device to the guest. Virtio RNG just appears as a regular hardware RNG to the guest, which the kernel reads from to fill its entropy pool. This effectively allows a host to inject entropy into a guest via several means: The default mode uses the host's /dev/random, but a physical HW RNG device or EGD (Entropy Gathering Daemon) source can also be used.

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